I have been using TurboTax (TT) for only 3 years, before that 25+ years with TaxCut.
TT is exceptionally slow to launch, which is what the original post on this thread is about. It has gotten better over those years but still leaves room for improvement. Today it is about 10 seconds to load using a PC with an i5-11320H, 16M RAM, and a 512G SSD with a 300Mbps Fiber connection, with no data file.
The generic troubleshooting suggestions offered by Intuit employees are of no value. You should instead provide user feedback to your development team. Loading TurboTax should not take longer to load than excel (or TaxCut). If TT is going to its server to check for license validation, that should not be necessary to hold up a user session. If it checking for updates, that can be backround and presented later.
Another possible problem relates to the data file (---.tax2024). I did notice on my first use of TT that when I connected and downloaded tax information from banks and financial institutions, that the resulting data file was relatively large and load time was very slow. I checked some of the details and the tax information appeared to be transaction level. So, I deleted that file and started new, but instead of permitting TurboTax to download all my data, I entered it manually- not as transactions, but at a summary level which is all that the IRS needs. The file was then SIGNIFICANTLY faster for load. I don't know if this is still a problem. It does not take that much longer to enter the summary transactions, and I prefer the transaction level data not be anywhere that a third party can access. By the way, Tax cut also loaded significant detail when I chose to download financial tax info. But application load times were not impacted.
